Jared Jakins and Carly Jakins are Emmy nominated documentary filmmakers and life partners rooted in the rural American West. Their 2022 feature debut, Scenes From the Glittering World, was broadcast on ITVS’s Independent Lens, and their work has also been featured by POV, the Los Angeles Times, Vimeo Staff Picks, and The Atlantic. Below, Jared Jakins explains why they chose to make their story “Rat Rod,” which is presented by Switchboard Magazine, into a short documentary.
We were nearly finished hanging paper tablecloths from a menagerie of fishing line and gaff tape when we heard the first CLANG!
As far as we knew, my producer and I were alone in an auto body shop. A garbage can must have tipped over, or perhaps the wind lifted some distant sheet metal. It was after-hours and the place was dark, save for a few flickering overhead fluorescents. We took the momentary fright as a supernatural encouragement, given our goal: to create an apparition.
Our ghost would come alive on camera, with the help of fans and a little puppeteering done by our co-director, Carly Jakins. As I stepped back to look at our billowing sheets, their peaks evoking eerie white hoods, the team and I knew we had nailed our visual conceit. That moment raised my confidence that the story we were telling was meant to be a documentary short film.
That film, “Rat Rod,” is a portrait of a family friend named Jorge Ramirez and his experiences immigrating from Mexico City to rural Utah in the 1990s. Jorge is a mechanic who got his start building stunt bicycles, and ultimately found his passion in building cars. He’s an accomplished builder of “rat rods,” Frankenstein cars built from scratch by harvesting parts from other vehicles.
As a fellow immigrant myself, I found in Jorge’s process an embodiment of the American promise of “e pluribus unum” — out of many, one.
The Backtory of ‘Rat Rod’
Jorge and my father are longtime friends, and over the years he shared stories about life as a young immigrant in America. I was struck not by the stories themselves, traumatic and affecting as they were, but rather the hauntedness with which Jorge told his life’s story. This tone, more than the content of his stories, demanded further investigation. I wanted to explore the specter of trauma left lingering and unresolved.
The pursuit of that feeling was a goal I believed would be best met through a short film. Whenever I begin a project, I ask a simple a question: “What medium will best serve this story?” Far too often, I believe filmmakers default to telling stories through film even though the story could be better explored in another artistic form. They do not explicitly seek ways that film might specifically illuminate a subject.
Film has the capacity to delve deep into our interior experience and memories, but it shares that quality with the written word. More unique is film’s ability to capture presence. It is a time-based medium which allows us to be present with a person and their thoughts. It fosters a temporal connection unbound by proximity; in a film, we can share time and experiences with a distant, or even a departed, person.
Even more remarkably, that shared time can be derived from the complexities of memory or the fleeting recollections of dreams. I believe the documentary short film is the corner of the medium where these strengths are best exemplified, yet under explored.
The short film is often regarded as a practical exercise, or demonstration that a filmmaker may be skilled enough make a feature film. This approach tends to condense the structures and interests of a feature-length project into the body of a short, a miniaturizing process. This approach, though not necessarily detrimental in terms of raw information delivery, often results in a shallow but broad experience with a subject. The short begs to go deep and narrow.
I make no claim to having mastered this art, but I strive to incorporate these ideas into my own work. In the case of “Rat Rod,” I questioned my approach until I reached a satisfying conclusion. I understood that I could share Jorge’s stories in any number of mediums, but I could only traverse his haunted memories in a short documentary.
Our task was not made easy simply because we determined a short film was the right medium for Jorge. He is not an actor, and we couldn’t expect him to express the nuances of his feelings through a performance. After discussions with Jorge about how he experiences his memories, we settled on a visual gambit: Jorge’s trauma would be externalized via a ghostly apparition.
We could borrow from the horror genre (John Carpenter’s Christine became a core influence) and lean into the history of practical effects to dramatize our spooky doings.
We felt that this idea — depicting an apparition onscreen to represent trauma — would wear thin over the course of a feature-length film, and it certainly wouldn’t translate to written or audio storytelling. We moved forward, emboldened that a short documentary was still the best medium for this story.
Soon, we were hanging sheets from a ceiling, hoping for the best. When the apparition finally took shape, and the “real” ghosts haunting Jorge’s shop gave us their blessing, we knew we were capturing something special. In the months since we have finished the film, audiences experiencing Jorge’s story have shared an enthusiasm for and connection with this core visual metaphor.
To our great relief, our idea worked. We are hopeful that even more viewers will see the film through our partnership with Switchboard Magazine and our Academy Award campaign.
As filmmakers, we can’t control how our work will be received, but we are empowered to discern the right medium for each message. A terrific story can lose its very essence if executed in an improper form. In the case of Rat Rod, we feel that our careful process was worth its time and energy. It resulted in a work that we believe could only exist as a short film.
Main image: “Rat Rod,” courtesy of Switchboard Magazine.